About

What We Do

We live in the space where technology, design-thinking and humanity meet to make smarter software.

Story

From a young age, Tim and Sam Mateosian were known to be natural tinkerers, inventors, and hackers. As brothers growing up in rural and coastal Maine, both became voracious autodidacts with complementary skills and interests. They have over twenty respective years of experience in software engineering, hardware, Internet technology, design, web development, and user experience.

In 2002, Tim and Sam combined their powers and co-founded Big Room Studios. It was born with a no-nonsense business plan to find solutions to the hard-bitten problems that matter to people. We collect the best and brightest people, and employ them to solve tough problems presented by businesses and individuals alike. In the process, we uncover potential new products, which we offer to the world — sometimes for free, and sometimes as a completely new business.

Tim and Sam founded Big Room in 2002, successfully bootstrapping it into the lean but mighty team it is today. As software engineers ourselves, we’ve helped build startups like NextWorth and ruck.us, and worked with renowned brands like Fairmont and Target. We choose to operate in Portland, Maine because it is one of the best communities on Earth. We’d love to show you around, get to know one another, and make something awesome together.

We love entrepreneurs and startups. We love helping big businesses break into new fields. We hate waste, bureaucracy, and political correctness. We love art and technology. We love to work with passionate people and big ideas. We love making people happy.

People First

Everyone contributes and everyone has a voice. That’s our “people first” approach. We work in small, independent teams and run our company as a flat organization, because bureaucracy and politics don't create the best products.
Whether it's our employees, our clients, or the users of the software we create, we focus on the person at the heart of the solution, rather than the problems. We listen to understand, not just to respond. And we relentlessly pursue a better way to do things.
We are always looking for innovative software engineers, designers and strategists to teach us something new, and help us grow.

Tim Mateosian

Founder / CEO

Barney

Tim’s Cat

Sam Mateosian

Co-Founder

Ken

Sam’s Orangutan

M.W. Felker II

Solution Architect

Harlee & Gus

M.W.’s Dogs

Justin Varberakis

Lead Product Designer

Peanut

Justin’s Cat

Rebekah Lee

Product Designer

Gilly, Henry, Dexter & Olivia

Rebekah’s Cats

William Sullivan

Director of Business Development

Nessie

William’s Chameleon

Brian Leighton

Development Manager

Star

Brian’s Dog

Devin Ivy

Senior Developer

Wolfie

Devin’s Calculator

Jared Donisvitch

Senior Front End Developer

Lily

Jared’s Cat

Zack McCartney

Developer

Captain Scrumples

Zack’s Groundhog

Bill Woodruff

Developer

Yumemitchi

Bill’s Tamagachi

Why we do it?

Frankly, we can’t imagine doing anything else. Working with friends and building ambitious technical projects is what we set out to do over 15 years ago when we started BRS.
We aren’t the type to watch from the sidelines as someone else builds the future. We’ll always be at the front, experimenting, testing, failing better, and creating smarter software that people love to use.

Build, Measure, Learn

We practice an iterative approach to problem solving. We craft the simplest solution, measure it’s success, and learn from the results. Rinse, and repeat.

This process contrasts the traditional waterfall strategy model employed for decades by many enterprise solution providers. The traditional method wastes time, energy, and money and often results in poor outcomes. Incorporating lean, agile-ish development strategies into our process is one of the many ways we do better.